Chapter 20 #2
For a long minute, Jo couldn’t reply. This was how it was sometimes.
The best ones got away. The paper lived to fight another day.
Didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell. Didn’t mean that she wasn’t burning with a furious sense of injustice, tears pricking at the back of her eyes.
But then, that was just a bit of selfish pride really, wasn’t it?
All the vaccine-damaged and whooping cough families would be cared for and compensated privately.
Maybe the rest of the story would come out in the end, despite the best fire-fighting efforts of the pharmaceutical company.
And meanwhile, wasn’t the Quintet promise a victory? Parents would be fully informed and children would be screened. There would be much less chance of this happening to anyone else’s precious child.
She squeezed at her nose to try and make the tears that were threatening go away.
‘We all fought your corner,’ Jeff told her. ‘Spikey’s very proud of you. Obviously, he doesn’t know anything about your Friday night computer hacking mission and never will.’
‘Thanks,’ she said finally, tears successfully squeezed. ‘I think maybe I will have another drink. What about you?’
‘Yes please and don’t let the buggers get you down.’
‘Your wedding ring?’ she asked. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t notice… and you didn’t say anything—’
‘Yup,’ he broke in, then drained the last of his beer. ‘Come and sit down with me in a nicer spot. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that.’
At a small table in one of the quieter corners of the bar, Jeff lined up two drinks for them.
‘Something soft, orange juice for me,’ Jo had changed her mind.
She wanted to listen to this story with a slightly clearer head.
Then he began to explain how he and Frances, his wife of nineteen years, the mother of his two teenage sons, had come to the decision to separate.
‘I think it had a lot to do with the fact that it would have been our twentieth wedding anniversary this summer,’ was one of his admissions.
‘Every so often we’d talk about the anniversary and have these open-ended discussions about what we’d do to celebrate it.
Were we going to have a big party? Go on a second honeymoon?
‘The more we talked about it, the more time we seemed to spend wondering if we were happy, wondering where all the years had gone, wondering if just another twenty years of the same was ahead for us.
‘I don’t think I was as bothered about it as Frances.
She’s been really down for months. She went off to Majorca on her own in April, said she was looking into property over there, started talking about selling up, moving…
early retirement!’ Jeff spluttered at this.
‘Early retirement,’ he repeated. ‘I’m forty-five, not sixty!
I know my hours are long, I know I’ve never spent as much time with my family as they would like me to have – but does anyone? ’
Jo had to shake her head.
‘I’ve been as good a dad and as good a husband as I could have been but I am a bloody great news editor.’
Emphatically he added, ‘I am not leaving my job.’ He picked up his beer glass and took a drink. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘if Frances had me with her retired in Majorca twenty-four hours a day, we’d be divorced within a week.’
Jo’s image of Frances filled her head. She’d met Jeff’s wife at office parties and for the occasional chat in the car park when Frances had arrived to collect a three-drinks-down Jeff from the pub and drive him home to what Jo had always imagined would be a big, comfortable, conservatory-clad home in the outer reaches of north London.
Jeff’s wife was a glamorous forty-something with long blonde hair, a tan, a taste for suede, heels and pink nails.
She worked in interior design, drove a stonking big suburb-mobile, smelled exotic, joked, gossiped and chatted constantly, doted on her teenage boys and had always seemed to be warm, loving, caring and super-tolerant of Jeff and his all-demanding job.
But what could you ever know about other people’s marriages?
‘This doesn’t sound like anything too serious,’ Jo reassured him. ‘It’s just a… mild mid-marriage crisis or something. Sounds like it will all blow over.’
‘Ha, well, I don’t think so. She’s told me she’s met an English estate agent over in Majorca and they’ve had what she describes as a “brief affair” but she’s now gone back out there to “see what happens”.
’ Jeff made the collar-loosening move that Jo recognised from some of their most stressful working moments together.
His eyes met hers briefly but then wandered off around the room, failing to find anything to settle on.
‘You’re joking,’ was her response.
‘No, no…’ he was looking at her again. ‘I’ve known about this for exactly two weeks and we’re already talking about selling the house,’ he confided. ‘That’s how out of touch I’ve been with her. Not exactly a good sign.’
Jo wondered how Jeff had managed to keep up such an amazing impersonation of normality at work, while this was going on. ‘You should have taken some time off,’ she told him. ‘This is terrible.’
‘God, no,’ was Jeff’s verdict. ‘We’ve spent entire evenings ranting at each other – work has been a nice escape.
I’ve heard all the “you never appreciated me,” “you take me for granted,” “we’re in a total rut” stuff every single night.
It’s been like living in a bloody soap,’ he couldn’t help smiling.
‘I drove her to the airport first thing on Tuesday and it was a bloody relief to leave her there.’
He stopped for another swig, while Jo struggled to summon up words of comfort. It was just so surprising.
Jeff was a fixed point in her life, a constant, her support system.
A man who’d never been to her home, who’d never met her children or her friends.
In fact, she’d only seen him in the Swan or in and around the office, but over the last four years he’d become one of the most important men in her life.
The fact that his marriage and maybe his state of mind were about to unravel around her was deeply unsettling.
‘Has she been in touch from Majorca?’ Jo asked.
‘She’s phoned the boys,’ Jeff replied. ‘Doesn’t want to talk to me.’
‘Bloody hell, Jeff. I can’t believe it! Do you think you’ll get divorced?’
‘Well, what do you think? It’s looking pretty likely to me.’
‘Do you want to get divorced?’ she asked him, registering the shadows under his eyes for the first time.
He propped his chin up with his hands and made the tongue-clicking sound she associated with moments of hard concentration and big-decision-making on the news desk.
‘I don’t know,’ he said finally, ‘I don’t know her any more. How did that happen? I know you… I know Declan over there, Vince, Aidan, Mike, Rod, Spikey, Binah… I know just about every single person in my office better than I know my own wife. How did that happen?’